Live Chat For Your Website – Luxury or Necessity?

What’s the deal with live chat? First it was nowhere, then it was everywhere. If your website doesn’t have a live chat facility in the current year, does this mean you’re in danger of being left behind?

Or does it simply mean that you’re prudent enough to assess its merits before jumping in? Perhaps both actually. The case for and against offering live chat depends on a number of factors including the nature of your business and the size of it.

If all live chat is going to do is suck up valuable resources and consign your employees to answering inane queries from trolls, then live chat probably isn’t the best use of your time. On the other hand, if live chat will provide an enhanced visitor experience, increase customer retention and aid brand loyalty, it’s got to be worth a shot. Like anything in life though, if live chat is worth doing, it’s worth doing right.

Why live chat?

There are two ways to deliver live chat: proactively and reactively. The former model attempts to strike up conversation with visitors shortly after they alight on your site, switching from automated to human-operated chat as soon as the visitor responds.

The other, less intrusive, form of chat is only activated when the visitor clicks on that pop-up window and voluntarily initiates a conversation. Generally speaking, this is the method you’ll be looking to use on your website, unless you happen to operate in a sales-driven industry where more aggressive techniques such as proactive chat are expected.

When you envisage setting up live chat software, you might envision it turning into a logistical nightmare from the set-up to the day-to-day operation. Thankfully, it doesn’t need to be that way: there are third-party live chat platforms that do everything for you and which require minimal technical knowledge to implement. (Besides, if you’re considering adding live chat you’re probably large enough to have a web development team you can outsource that sort of stuff to). As for the ongoing operation of live chat, one thing to bear in mind is that you don’t have to provide a service 24/7. The internet might never sleep but you can and should.

Click to connect

Most websites that have live chat software display their operating hours when you click on the pop-up chat window. Although large websites will operate right around the clock, it’s more common for there to be set hours. Customers might be demanding at times but they’re not unrealistic and don’t expect a business to have live chat operatives at their beck and call every hour of the night and day.

Another point that’s worth noting is that many businesses don’t actually handle their live chat in-house: it’s all outsourced to companies who specialise in this sort of thing. If you’ve ever visited an online casino for instance and have attempted to contact customer support via live chat, you’ll have been speaking with an agent who will be performing the same task for dozens or possibly even hundreds of other casinos.

You might balk at entrusting this critical customer support channel to a third-party – one that doesn’t know your business nearly as well as you – and you might have a point. As your business grows however you’re going to need to relinquish control, and outsourcing your live chat is a small step towards learning to let go. Doing so doesn’t have to involve crossing your fingers and hoping for the best: you can still oversee the the project, view chat logs and access analytics that will show whether your live chat is aiding with conversions.

Interested in applying live chat? Jumplead is a great tool to help you connect with your visitors. Start helping visitors become customers. Try Jumplead today!

The benefits of live chat

We’ve touched upon the enhanced customer experience and brand loyalty, but there’s one benefit of live chat we’ve yet to to consider. Let’s talk about the beautiful things that can happen when you sync your live chat with CRM. Once you can identify your visitors, that’s when things start to get personal. Not awkwardly personal, but just enough to gain an insight into the behaviour of your visitors, like whether they’re turning into customers or are navigating elsewhere with their needs unfulfilled.

Once you connect your live chat to your CRM, you turn on a stream of raw data in real time, data that enables you to gain a deep and hitherto unprecedented insight into the mindset of visitors to your site. That treasure trove of data alone might just be enough to tip the balance in favour of installing live chat software.

The benefits to the customer

Fun as the possibilities afforded by CRM integration are, let’s return to the customer again and consider what’s in it for them. The main benefit of live chat from a customer perspective is that it resolves queries instantly. These are the sort of queries that can make or break a sale. Humans are an impatient bunch and our patience, like our attention spans, keeps shortening.

Searching through FAQs to find an answer to a question? Ain’t nobody got time for that. The sort of queries you’ll commonly field might be banal – “What’s your returns policy?” – but they’re also crucial, for it’s these niggling issues that can make the difference between a sale and a missed opportunity. As customers, we want our Amazon goods delivered the same day and we want our questions answered in real time by a real person. If you can’t offer that, your customers will take their business to someone who can.

One Marketing Power study cites visitors who use live chat as being three times more likely to buy. That’s because live chat ties into everything that good CRM is all about: personalisation. We live in an increasingly impersonal world, one of self-scan checkouts and touchscreen ordering in fast food restaurants, and yet we still crave those person to person interactions that remind us that we’re still human.

Given the choice between being placed on hold with an automated telephone support system or speaking to a real operator via live chat, the customer is always going to side with chat. It doesn’t matter who’s on the other side of that chat window – what matters is that there is someone and that they’re doing their best to respond to your query.

Live chat for your website then – luxury or necessity? It’s for you to do the math, calculate the costs and decide whether it’s worth taking the plunge. Don’t do it just because all your rivals are doing it. If you decide to go ahead, do it for your own reasons, and then analyse the data that live chat furnishes you with to determine whether your reasons were justified. If you’re generating enough business to justify installing live chat, don’t be surprised if you find yourself wondering how you ever got by without it. Humans love to chat. So go on: make it easy for them to strike up a conversation.

What’s the deal with live chat? First it was nowhere, then it was everywhere. If your website doesn’t have a live chat facility in the current year, does this mean you’re in danger of being left behind?

Or does it simply mean that you’re prudent enough to assess its merits before jumping in? Perhaps both actually. The case for and against offering live chat depends on a number of factors including the nature of your business and the size of it.

If all live chat is going to do is suck up valuable resources and consign your employees to answering inane queries from trolls, then live chat probably isn’t the best use of your time. On the other hand, if live chat will provide an enhanced visitor experience, increase customer retention and aid brand loyalty, it’s got to be worth a shot. Like anything in life though, if live chat is worth doing, it’s worth doing right.

Why live chat?

There are two ways to deliver live chat: proactively and reactively. The former model attempts to strike up conversation with visitors shortly after they alight on your site, switching from automated to human-operated chat as soon as the visitor responds.

The other, less intrusive, form of chat is only activated when the visitor clicks on that pop-up window and voluntarily initiates a conversation. Generally speaking, this is the method you’ll be looking to use on your website, unless you happen to operate in a sales-driven industry where more aggressive techniques such as proactive chat are expected.

When you envisage setting up live chat software, you might envision it turning into a logistical nightmare from the set-up to the day-to-day operation. Thankfully, it doesn’t need to be that way: there are third-party live chat platforms that do everything for you and which require minimal technical knowledge to implement. (Besides, if you’re considering adding live chat you’re probably large enough to have a web development team you can outsource that sort of stuff to). As for the ongoing operation of live chat, one thing to bear in mind is that you don’t have to provide a service 24/7. The internet might never sleep but you can and should.

Click to connect

Most websites that have live chat software display their operating hours when you click on the pop-up chat window. Although large websites will operate right around the clock, it’s more common for there to be set hours. Customers might be demanding at times but they’re not unrealistic and don’t expect a business to have live chat operatives at their beck and call every hour of the night and day.

Another point that’s worth noting is that many businesses don’t actually handle their live chat in-house: it’s all outsourced to companies who specialise in this sort of thing. If you’ve ever visited an online casino for instance and have attempted to contact customer support via live chat, you’ll have been speaking with an agent who will be performing the same task for dozens or possibly even hundreds of other casinos.

You might balk at entrusting this critical customer support channel to a third-party – one that doesn’t know your business nearly as well as you – and you might have a point. As your business grows however you’re going to need to relinquish control, and outsourcing your live chat is a small step towards learning to let go. Doing so doesn’t have to involve crossing your fingers and hoping for the best: you can still oversee the the project, view chat logs and access analytics that will show whether your live chat is aiding with conversions.

Interested in applying live chat? Jumplead is a great tool to help you connect with your visitors. Start helping visitors become customers. Try Jumplead today!

The benefits of live chat

We’ve touched upon the enhanced customer experience and brand loyalty, but there’s one benefit of live chat we’ve yet to to consider. Let’s talk about the beautiful things that can happen when you sync your live chat with CRM. Once you can identify your visitors, that’s when things start to get personal. Not awkwardly personal, but just enough to gain an insight into the behaviour of your visitors, like whether they’re turning into customers or are navigating elsewhere with their needs unfulfilled.

Once you connect your live chat to your CRM, you turn on a stream of raw data in real time, data that enables you to gain a deep and hitherto unprecedented insight into the mindset of visitors to your site. That treasure trove of data alone might just be enough to tip the balance in favour of installing live chat software.

The benefits to the customer

Fun as the possibilities afforded by CRM integration are, let’s return to the customer again and consider what’s in it for them. The main benefit of live chat from a customer perspective is that it resolves queries instantly. These are the sort of queries that can make or break a sale. Humans are an impatient bunch and our patience, like our attention spans, keeps shortening.

Searching through FAQs to find an answer to a question? Ain’t nobody got time for that. The sort of queries you’ll commonly field might be banal – “What’s your returns policy?” – but they’re also crucial, for it’s these niggling issues that can make the difference between a sale and a missed opportunity. As customers, we want our Amazon goods delivered the same day and we want our questions answered in real time by a real person. If you can’t offer that, your customers will take their business to someone who can.

One Marketing Power study cites visitors who use live chat as being three times more likely to buy. That’s because live chat ties into everything that good CRM is all about: personalisation. We live in an increasingly impersonal world, one of self-scan checkouts and touchscreen ordering in fast food restaurants, and yet we still crave those person to person interactions that remind us that we’re still human.

Given the choice between being placed on hold with an automated telephone support system or speaking to a real operator via live chat, the customer is always going to side with chat. It doesn’t matter who’s on the other side of that chat window – what matters is that there is someone and that they’re doing their best to respond to your query.

Live chat for your website then – luxury or necessity? It’s for you to do the math, calculate the costs and decide whether it’s worth taking the plunge. Don’t do it just because all your rivals are doing it. If you decide to go ahead, do it for your own reasons, and then analyse the data that live chat furnishes you with to determine whether your reasons were justified. If you’re generating enough business to justify installing live chat, don’t be surprised if you find yourself wondering how you ever got by without it. Humans love to chat. So go on: make it easy for them to strike up a conversation.